Joss Whedon fires back at Justice League allegations by Ray Fisher

After being called out by a string of former employees for misconduct on various sets, filmmaker Joss Whedon has resurfaced in a new interview to answer and clarify the allegations. Specifically, he disputes claims made by actors Ray Fisher and Gal Gadot in multiple social posts in 2020 and 2021 about Whedon’s misogynistic and racist actions on the set of justice league . Anonymous employees have accused the film’s former director Zack Snyder of being the cause of Whedon’s troubles and that Snyder’s fans have become fans outraged by tribalism.

“The early days of the internet lifted me up and the modern internet dragged me down,” Whedon says in the story. “I don’t lose the perfect symmetry.”

The cover story in the latest issue of New York Magazine describes Whedon’s journey from growing up in a “palazzo apartment” on the Upper West Side to British boarding schools and Wesleyan to writing the original Buffy script to take Web 1.0 by storm Buffycast and crew of , embedded in message boards. But the content of the article addresses the multitude of abuse allegations now being leveled against Whedon.

These allegations span almost every TV show Whed on has been involved in – Buffy, angel, firefly, dollhouse

, and Agents of SHIELD, which Joss created together with his half-brother and his wife. In some cases Whedon is said to have abused the power dynamic to date women on these shows, in others he grabs women’s arms and refuses to let them go even when they say they are in pain, and in others he humiliates women writers. An unnamed author on Firefly recalls a time in New York history when Whedon called a staff meeting for an impromptu talk to poke fun at a female staffer’s script. “I’ve had my share of crappy showrunners, but intent to hurt — that’s what sets me apart now.” Whedon admits wrongful conduct, largely due to being a young person in a position of power, and denies others.

Interestingly, anonymous members of Whedon’s inner circle have an origin story for where these allegations begin: the set of justice league.

Photo by Mike Coppola/Getty Images

Perhaps no film of the 2010s has been as riddled with turmoil as it has been justice league, A film that has been re-launched to the extent that a new adaptation was released last year. Popular history has it that Whedon was hired to direct after the tragic suicide death of Zack Snyder’s daughter, although Whedon objects to the narrative. According to the filmmaker, Warner Bros. tapped him to take over when an early screening caused executives to lose faith in the Snyder cut. “They asked me to fix it and I thought I could help,” says Whedon. The profile describes his gun-for-hire performance as “one of the biggest regrets of his life”.

Where did something go wrong with Whedon’s tales? Everywhere, everywhere, everywhere. He was asked by Warner to provide 40 days of reshoots and realized that Snyder designed sets very differently. Snyder encouraged his actors to act out their scenes as they pleased and solicited their contributions. Whedon, who had made a name for himself as a writer, wanted you to read his words exactly as he wrote them.

“It wasn’t well received at all,” recalls an unnamed crew member.

This fundamental difference in approach seems to have informed every interaction Whedon had with the actors justice league. For Ray Fisher, who played Cyborg – specifically the first black superhero in a DC movie – the differences became personal. Snyder had asked for Fisher’s help in packaging Cyborg, to the extent that New York Magazine writer Lila Shapiro describes Fisher as a “writing partner” of Snyder and screenwriter Chris Terrio.

“With a white writer and a white director, we both felt it was very important to have a black actor’s perspective,” Terrio said The Hollywood Reporter in 2021.

A big part of Fisher’s perspective was a tragic backstory for Cyborg involving his parents, “two black people on a genius level,” Fisher told The Hollywood Reporter. According to the actor, those scenes were cut when Whedon took over the director’s chair. On a conference call, Fisher said he mourned the loss but was willing to move on, but Whedon reportedly cut him off. “It feels like I’m just taking notes right now,” Fisher claims, Whedon said, “and I don’t like taking notes on anyone — not even Robert Downey Jr.”

Fisher isn’t the only actor who has spoken out about Whedon’s treatment on set, and Gal Gadot has also accused the director of endangering her career. But Fisher’s many accusations of being forced to recite catchphrases and using color grading to alter his skin tone clearly stuck with Whedon.

Whedon says the color correction Fisher suggests to lighten the color of his skin was applied throughout the film, where everything was made lighter in post-production. Cyborg’s abridged plot “logically didn’t make sense,” Whedon now says, and Fisher’s character was put to a terrible test by audiences. The two actually talked a lot about the characters and were friendly. In Whedon’s world, the problem lies with Fisher’s functionality in the film. “We’re talking about a malevolent force,” he says to New York. “We’re talking about a bad actor in two senses.”

The New York Magazine article cites a number of unnamed Whedon allies who have “proposed a theory: What if Fisher had given Snyders directions? Without providing evidence, they speculated that Snyder had tricked Fisher into thinking Whedon was a racist.” According to this theory, which Whedon neither endorses nor condemns, Snyder’s manipulation of Fisher is “poisoned [Charisma Carpenter of Buffy] against Whedon, leading her to view the complicated history of their relationship as a simplistic tale of abuse.”

There is no evidence of a conspiracy between Snyder and Fisher, nor is there any evidence that Charisma Carpenter does not understand her own relationship with Whedon. Whedon holds on to his own legacy at the end of the story. “I think I’m one of the nicer showrunners of all time,” he says.

Fisher, who had reportedly declined several New York Magazine requests to speak for the article, responded to the profile with a tweet He said that it “looks like Joss Whedon needs to stage an endgame after all…” while refusing to address “all the lies and buffoons,” preferring instead to celebrate the work of Martin Luther King on his birthday.